The Testament Of Ann Lee

The primary creative duo behind last year’s The Brutalist reunite, with co-writer Mona Fastvold taking over the megaphone from Brady Corbet, but this time their epic, sprawling mode of storytelling details a real life – that of Ann Lee, eighteenth-century founder of the Shakers religious sect, whose dramatisation here borders on fundamentalist propaganda.

The inherent feminist intentions of a story about a largely forgotten woman who played an important role in history are built into the film’s thesis that the Second Coming should take female form for a change, and the woman in question is ‘Mother’ Lee herself.

The script captures the baroque colloquial idiom of the time and place, both in dialogue and in Thomasin McKenzie’s omniscient and sometimes intrusive narration. It spells out the setting and circumstances for the benefit of a general audience who probably knows nothing about it already, yet it assumes a certain level of intelligence and curiosity within them.

Manchester’s biggest church looms over the location like Castle Dracula, a vast symbol of religious orthodoxy filling the sky and oppressing the local peasants by its very presence. At ground level, this is an eighteenth century bereft of posh frocks and country piles; here, children are put to work at t’mill, sleeping ten to a room, in whose corners chickens cluck and babies wail.

The light is grey and diffuse, especially indoors where it can only enter chastely through a window. But when the true brightness of the sun emerges at moments of imminent revelation, it bathes the Lancastrian topography (filmed in Budapest) with an unnatural gleam, occluded by trees or backlighting the characters in a halo which, depending on the angle, paints them as divine or carnal.

The physical expression of this new religious fervour, the celibate adherents’ bodies literally shaking as their name suggests, fills the entire wide screen, as the congregation thrusts out their arms in a rhythmic gesture of prayer that fits somewhere between Ken Russell’s The Devils and a mid-’80s Kate Bush video.

The sexual connotations of these spasms, grunts and ululations are very much brought to the surface, as animal impulses are transubstantiated into the performative love of God. These scenes are so intense and full-blooded that they can seem almost comical, but Fastvold lingers long enough that they pass through that and become, if not convincing, then at least totally sincere.

Editor Sofía Subercaseaux deftly splices in bludgeoningly obvious images of nature during times of emotional or sexual stress or release, as a direct line to Lee’s subconscious just as bold as Celia Rowlson-Hall’s extreme choreography. However, all of this devoted subjectivity can backfire the more time we spend with these tiresomely self-righteous zealots, to the point where the arrival of the authorities to burn down their church and whip them into submission might come as a blessed relief.

Sex and childbirth are depicted with the same brazenness as the actual shaking, all three of them an act of defiance against religious persecution, which seems almost blasphemous when soundtracked with the authentic period hymns as rearranged by Daniel Blumberg in the form of a full-on musical.

Amanda Seyfried gamely leaps into the fires of emotional constipation, exhausting physical rigour and a difficult Mancunian accent, acquitting herself with tear- and snot-stained dedication. The film tends to spread out around her like an ever-expanding ream of cotton, and she does her very best to fold it all up around her like the prophet of the future she’s supposed to be.

The Testament of Ann Lee is a furiously unsubtle exercise in re-examining history from a vanishingly small point of view (the film points out that as of 2025 there are only two Shakers still shaking). It’s a commendable goal in a thematic and political sense, and the film-makers wear these insignia on their sleeves, but most of the drama ends up swamped by the director’s repetitive formal agitations.

It’s an interesting experiment, often brilliantly directed, but it’s far too theatrical to be truly satisfying.

-Stew Mott-